Bananzadeh was testifying as part of Waymo's lawsuit against Uber, which claims the ride-hailing company stole intellectual property and trade secrets to develop its own autonomous technology.

Bananzadeh said it costs at least $1.1 billion to develop three different trade secrets within that seven-year time period. That figure, however, is a low estimate because it does not factor in equity and other expenses, Bananzadeh said.

"As I mentioned earlier, there are — there are equity that's missing from this, as well as, like, intracompany expenses of the allocated expensive," he said.

Before it was Waymo, Google's self-driving-car research was an internal program dubbed Project Chauffeur. The secretive project was born in 2009, but it was kept under wraps, making it difficult to assess how much Google was spending to make its driverless utopian vision a reality.

Bananzadeh's testimony shows Google spent at least $1.1 billion on just tech development from the program's inception to 2015.